Western Short StoryThe Bridge to Maggie's MeadowTom Sheehan

Western Short Story

Margaret Brody, on
the rim of the huge ravine that plunged hundreds of feet down to the
dark earth, studied the far side. Her hat thrown back, blond and
beautiful, her horse as still as silence, she sat her saddle with
ultimate ease. Any fall from the edge would be certain death, yet she
concentrated on the opposite wall, a seemingly blank facade but one
with slight discolorations in the strata, lines that moved in strange
fashions if she changed her position or her line of sight. Even the
slightest move on her part provided additional information to her
inquisitive mind. She read the strata colors as if she was reading
ancient hieroglyphics, each turn or shift having something to say to
one who is observant. Abruptly, in the swift light of the mind, in
one swift moment she would remember forever, the magic was on her.

Heaven was at hand.

She had just turned
nineteen years old, about as bright as the sun shining down on her at
that hour. For her short life, she had been awaiting arrival at this
place, the awesome peaks of a great mountain range practically
clouding the sky from where she sat her horse, and the mountains
holding promise in their dark escarpment.

She swore she had
known this place forever. But heading west on a wagon train in those
days also carried a rushing of flashbacks. It was the year 1875 and
the war was long over, though scars remained.

When Margaret Brody
was born in Boston, a short walk from the site of the battle of
Bunker Hill, it was said in the family that she gazed west with her
first look. (The family couldn’t argue much about that premise; the
whole bunch of them had come west from Ireland because of the famine
and the new opportunities.) Maggie carried the family mantle with
ease. As much as an Indian papoose gets its name from a first sign,
the idea stuck and the westerly signs continued with Maggie. When she
was only a dozen years old she told her parents she was born to
follow the sun. “Someday I am going out there where the wind will
get in my face and the mountains will get in my eyes, and where there
is enough room you can invite the stars down to share it.”

She was melodic,
but sincere about it. They knew there was a magic with her. She came
into the world as a blond beauty and stayed the blond beauty, her
luxurious mass of curls “probably passed down from some Viking
raider,” her grandfather had said. The curls and her smile bought
off everybody, but her interest and passion about the west culled
other people with similar passions from those who surrounded her.
They fed her hunger and passion.

At eighteen she was
ready, to go off on her own if necessary; the stories had never
stopped coming her way, and she had pursued anyone who had been west
or knew someone who had gone and had sent back information in any
form, oral, written or graphic. She had talked to sea captains who
had gone around the horn, wagon masters that had made a return
voyage, and she spent hours with an uncle who had “been west a
ways, all the way out to Ohio.”

She was captivated,
charmed, and titillated by the possible adventures. Then again, she
was rhapsodic, musical, ran a guitar until its strings whistled, and
carried a dream every waking moment of her life. Books that were
available about the western part of the country constantly found
their way into her possession, and the midnight oil always burned
low. Heroes flocked into her knowledge from all kinds of imagination…
her own and that of others, such as writers and yarn spinners.
Indian lore enamored her with brightness and interest in their ways
and talents, how the raw life could be lived to its fullest. All that
made up the western part of the country, every last sliver of it,
found its way into her lexicon, into her bursting and encyclopedic
mind.

“Look at this,”
she said to her father one day, “the Spanish explorer Coronado was
up this way here looking for the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola, and
tons of gold,” and she pointed out places on a map, “and other
Spaniard explorers followed him. And this man, this foreign-born
painter Albert Bierstadt, took three trips west and painted great
scenes he had seen.” Then she exclaimed, “I have seen some of
them. They’re marvelous. Really marvelous! They take your breath
away!”

Every way she
turned, the west came to hand and mind.

Another day she
called off the names of missionaries.” Father, I heard today about
two men, two missionaries, Cyrus Kingsberry and Alfred Wright, who
have gone among the Choctaws and Pawnees, at their own peril, to
teach them better ways, if that can be done. At the same time I
heard about the great Indian Pushmatawa and his nephew Nitakechi, and
how they were called to Washington to engage in a treaty pact. One of
them never got there.” Her excitement was contagious. “I met
this man at the library down on Mason Street and he knows more about
the west than I’ll ever know unless I get out there.”

He felt like a
school child as she filled him in on another daily lesson about
Butterfield’s Over Land Stage Company, and the great cow ranches of
Wilson Jones and Jonathan Nail that first brought horsemen to drive
great herds to northern railheads of new and far-reaching railroads.

Her father
remembered in particular the day she had carried on about how the
cattle were being driven in great herds by those riders called
cowboys who got a dollar a day and their meals and rode all day long
moving the herds from the Red River to Sedalia, Missouri. “But that
makes me think about the buffalo having lived out there for
practically forever and there has to be places there already where
cows or steers can live right off the land without having to be
driven for months on end, usually for about twenty miles a day, to
get put on a train. That’s a lot of work and riding and burning of
energies. I aim to see spaces like that, perfect places to let cattle
grow on their own right off the land.”

Even with her grasp
at western history and the people who rode and worked through it, her
father did not relent from his long stand of holding back on a move
west, until Maggie’s mother forced the issue. Before Maggie’s
father could sneeze, they were in Missouri and had become the newest
link of a wagon train pointed west. The plains and the mountains and
that other ocean were calling out to them.

From then on she
spent many days at the head of the train with the wagon master, Jam
Locus, bothering him endlessly with a barrage of questions. He
finally said, “What has loosed this fire in you, Maggie? No one in
my five trips hither ever showed this much fire.” He looked out at
a sea of grass being swayed by a simple breeze; the mountains, a few
days off yet and still waiting to be seen, might have sent the
breeze, he thought.

Some people, he
realized, had the knack of putting things together, and he wondered
if he’d ever get to that point, where Maggie was.

Maggie, in her way,
had either found or exposed admirable warmth in Jam Locus telling her
that sharing was permissible, and she replied, “Some of the things
I’ve never told my family are what keep me moving. They might think
I’m crazy, but I’ve dreamed about heaven being out here, a place
so beautiful and so hidden, I’ll be the only one to find it. It
will share mountains and grass so green it will scare you, and the
stars will own it all night long. When I am close to it, it’ll let
me know.”

“Any idea of
where that is?” said Locus, sitting his saddle out front, waiting
for his lead scout to report back from his outrider task, his eyes
always searching the horizon. “Ever draw yourself a map, Maggie? Do
you think you’ll want to leave the wagon train right off the bat if
this place lets you know it’s near, like it’s up the next gully
or canyon we pass?”

“I don’t know
now, but I’ll know then, right when it happens,” Her smile was so
charming that Locus could have melted.

The wagon train
meanwhile, like a small village on wheels, had its share of mishaps
en route; two still-born children were buried out on the wide grass,
a love affair floundered and passed on from one wagon to another, one
father accidentally shot himself in the leg and his daughter’s
boyfriend became the wagon captain, one case of poison ivy popped up
so badly Jam Locus had covered the boy with mud and a donation of
salt. The procedure, in a day’s time, worked wonders. Life went on
in and about the wagon train, the plains getting wider, the rivers
harder to cross, bands of Indians hanging on the outskirts for days
at a time, trying to steal a horse, a rifle, a woman.

And then, on the
rim of the great ravine, the light struck Margaret Brody head on.

“There!” she
exclaimed to Jam Locus, “I want to go over there, to that side.”
She was pointing to what appeared to Locus as a blank wall.

“There’s
nothing there, Maggie, but the other side.”

“You’re wrong,”
she said, then rode off to find her father. She explained it all to
him, and they approached Locus, Maggie explaining what kind of a man
they needed.

“I know of one
young man, an engineer from the railroad. Not a driver, but a
planner, who has designed bridges, put roads along the edge of a
mountain. I’ll see he talks to you when I see him in a few days.”

In a week, young
engineer Robert Marston had strung a foot bridge across the ravine,
the face of the opposite side staring at him all the time, his small
crew of men often laughing behind his back, yet all were enamored by
the enthusiasm of Maggie Brody who was on site each morning before
any of the others.

Marston guided
Maggie across, left her, went back and got her parents. Around a few
turns they went, wide enough for animals or a wagon, yet appearing to
be solid mass from a distance of fifty or sixty feet. And in one
twist and turn of the path, as if a last place on earth, they came
upon a vista of glorious light and sunshine and grass that filled
what might have been a thousand acres of land locked into the middle
of a mountain range. At the far end the thin line of a waterfall was
visible as it sparkled in its silver needle. White-tail deer grazed
openly on the grass. A pair of hawks drifted lazily on unseen swirls
of air high over their heads.

Maggie Brody said,
“All I need is a few breeders and a staunch bull to start a herd
that will have no match. There’ll be no question on that matter.
I’ve known it forever.” And images, hundreds of them in
glistening speed, ran through her mind.

She turned to look
at her father, who turned and said to young Marston, “Sir,” he
said, “can you build us a bridge over that hole in the ground that
will handle cattle and wagon stock?” He looked out over his
daughter’s dream land and said, “Until we find out if there is
another way in or out, but I seriously doubt this place has been
found yet. It’s heaven, you know. It’s right out of her dream,
this meadow of Maggie’s.”

Marston, also
staring out in front of them at the implausible spread of nature’s
bounty, said, “That I’ll do, sir, with pleasure.”

Maggie Brody had
heard none of it, lost once again in her dream, the old and the new
images still rushing through her senses, as she touched and smelled a
handful of green grass, saw the sun sparkle on the distant waterfall,
found a breeze on her face that tasted like water, and heard the cry
of a finger-winged hawk on an unseen thermal high over her head.